Lovely Fungal Gardens

I, for one, already have fungal gardens. I live in Foetid Florida, as the new travel guides all describe it:

Foetid Florida: Come for the Beaches, Stay For the Humid Alligators Colonized By Lichen and the Proliferating Rotting Smelly Mushrooms. (But you’ll really fall in love with the Scheming Lizard-Skinks and Their Old South Gnarly Squirrel Hench-Rodents.)
Jeff

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I know this strays from the topic of fungal gardens (They sure sold me on moving to Florida!) but does anyone have any insight into why Lovecraft is so popular? Not that I dislike Lovecraft, quite the opposite, but his work is idiosyncratic to the point of being annoying and, occasionally, unreadable. And before anyone jumps on me, I’m not trying to say that Lovecraft is a horrible writer that needs to be expunged from human memory, I’m just looking at some of the other writers of the same sort of material (C. A. Smith and Fritz Leiber specifically) and wondering when their webcomics and plush toys are going to be coming out.

I think that Lovecraft’s fans cluster around him simply because of his obscurity and near-impenetrably obtuse writing style. It’s also because I feel that people embrace him for the nihilistic, bleak philosophy expressed in his fiction. Maybe people pick him up as a sacred cow more for what he represents to them than his actual writerly merits. I’m not saying the guy’s no good – I like him in small doses – but I think that many more people say they like him than actually have taken the time to read his stuff.

That cartoon is absolutely hilarious! and the approach works for almost any Family circus cartoon!

Typical Family Circus cartoon:
Father: Who did this? (pointing to mess on carpet)
Kid: Not me.
(thought balloon shows a little puffy ghost-like character, with the name Not Me on his chest, running around the house knocking things over)

Revised version:
Father: Who did this? (pointing to mess on carpet)
Kid: Cthulhu has arisen from the lost city of R’lyeh to wreck his might vengence on the world.

But even with the fandom of sacred cow worshipers and fakers out there is there any explaination for the massive amounts of tie-in material? I already said plush toys and reappropriated comics, but what about the two different collectable card games, or the board games, or the multipule editions of the table top RPG, or the t-shirts, stickers, video games, tribute albums…who the f**k buys all these things?! What is it about Lovecraft that makes his indescribable monsters from beyond the stars so marketable?

About Jeff VanderMeer

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer has been named the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. His most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) from FSG, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. The trilogy also prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau” and has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, Vulture, Esquire.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp . His forthcoming novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer. You can contact him at pressinfo at vandermeercreative.com. (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy.) More...